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Donate a family. Save a writer!

April 4, 2011 in The TwitFace Project | 3 comments

A Declining Resource

I’ve had my concerns about blogging of course. Who hasn’t?

What is the impact on the planet, when every day millions of us use thousands of words, almost without thinking, as if the supply was never-ending?

There are those who claim that the word is a re-usable resource, and that we have enough words to last the next 100 years … by then, they say, we’ll have discovered new channels of communication. But my private research indicates an approaching crisis: each time a word is used, it loses a fraction of its original lustre and intensity, gradually diminishing until it becomes a meaningless black hole.

Here’s the evidence. In just 50 years, the life-expectancy of words has been reduced by a factor of 4. In the 1950s, the average reader struggled to understand Shakespeare and the King James Bible, but was comfortable with Dickens – so words had a half-life of about 200 years. For most of today’s readers, Dickens is impenetrable – and that’s a half-life of not much more than 50 years.

My fear is that with the explosive growth of blogging and the uncontrolled use of words, the rate of decay will accelerate until, in a matter of a few years, words will become meaningless even before they are written. All blogs – and even tweets – would be reduced to unintelligible mumbo-jumbo.

My Conservation Efforts

As a writer and blogger therefore, I feel I have a responsibility to the planet – to plant a new word for every thousand I consume. You may have noticed ‘macronym’ yesterday – an acronym using two or three letters of each word instead of just the initial; my example was ‘NaPoWriMo‘ – National Poetry Writing Month.

Here’s my contribution for today.

gread [gri:d] verb transitive or intransitive | p. gread [gred] | pp. gread [gred]

sounds like ‘breed’, ‘seed’

to download, subscribe to, or otherwise acquire large quantities of free or low-cost digital content without reading it.

e.g. “I’ve just tweeted all 50 blogs I’ve gread today.”

Derivation: a construct from the English words ‘greed’ and ‘read’


Greading: The Danger to Writers

If you thought word-decay was a problem, greading is a potential catastrophe. Because it kills writers and bloggers. Kills them with kindness.

This is how it goes. Annie joins a group including 200 other bloggers. Filled with optimism and good intentions, she tweets everyone in the group, subscribes to their blogs. Many of them reciprocate, and for the first few days, Annie’s on a high. But following the TwitFace Plan, her days are filled, and there’s no time to keep up with her new friends. Day by day, there are fewer responses, and before long, she’s writing mainly for her own pleasure once again, not anyone else’s.

Ed’s a writer determined to connect with as many readers as possible, so he decides to eliminate all price barriers to his novel. He’s interested, he says, in engaging with readers for the long term. Making money isn’t important right now. He offers his work for free, and is delighted with the sudden response. His books are ‘selling’ like never before. He waits a week or two for the reviews and the praise to start flowing. But they don’t. Because his books have been downloaded with hundreds of others, and the first page has never been opened.

For anyone who writes, only two things are important. Coffee and Attention. (I suppose I could add Money too, but if that’s a primary interest, you might do better getting a job in publishing, or setting up as an agent.)

A few weeks later Annie is playing Farmville; Ed has taken up online gambling. Hopes raised, then dashed – because of greading.

Another TwitFace Solution

But, my fellow TwitFacers, never fear. Now we’ve named the problem, we can understand it. And with understanding comes the solution. A distinctively TwitFace solution, which will benefit you, your family and the world community of writers.

Here’s the issue, you see: when everyone’s a writer, nobody’s a reader. We’re all just greaders. That’s all there’s time for. Tell me, truthfully. Are you a real reader, or a blogger making the effort to read? Aren’t you a greader too? Not just a little?

So here we all are, greading furiously. 30 million bloggers and 1 million writers … but wait! That’s not everyone! What about the other 6,878,887,629 people who don’t blog or write? Perhaps they’re not all your LinkedIn or Facebook friends, or you may not feel able to influence them … so let’s set our aims lower. What about the other 2.14 members of your own household? (Figures may vary – our household was me + 2.75 people last time I checked – but 3.14 people per household is the official average.)

You may remember that in my recent Health and Safety post, I introduced Standard Operating Procedures to minimize interruptions to your important work. I explained how effective Signage could help you maintain concentration even in a high-traffic area. But what better way to energize your working environment and silence your family members than putting them to work too – not as writers, but as readers? While you’re busy with the Ultimate Blog Challenge, why could they not be involved with NaDoFaSaWriMo? (That’s National Donate Your Family To Save A Writer Month – in case you haven’t figured it out. Aren’t macronyms a joy?)

Think what we could achieve. If you donated your 2.14 family members and each family member befriended 30 bloggers for a month, commenting on their posts every two days, you could singlehandedly support Annie and Ed and 60 other bloggers – who’d get dozens of comments a day. Greading would be unnecessary because bloggers would stay busy writing, not pretending to read. Your working hours would be significantly shorter, and disturbances significantly fewer.

We would of course need to insist that all bloggers supported by the scheme should plant a new word each day, in order to sustain and replenish the existing stock. But I can’t see why any blogger should object to that.

So if you’re as excited about this scheme as I am, why not donate your family today, by signing up below?

And to get things started, let’s see who can come up with the best caption for Ed’s photo, to encourage others to join TwitFace’s NaDoFaSaWriMo initiative – and save our bloggers and writers. There’s a prize for the most persuasive entry: a week’s worth of comments on your blog.

No greading!



Earlier posts in the TwitFace project:

The TwitFace Plan
7 Health & Safety Tips for Bloggers

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7 Health & Safety Tips for Bloggers

April 3, 2011 in The TwitFace Project | 5 comments



Is there a sextant in your
blogger’s toolkit? No?
Then you’d better read on.

It all started with Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote ….
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages …

Yes, his spelling was terrible, but what do you expect from a self-published author? Anyway, the point is that April was a time when people started making plans to go off on pilgrimage. And why? Well, if you’re familiar with The Canterbury Tales, you’ll know that the whole point of pilgrimage was meeting up with friends and strangers to swap stories. Tall stories, comic stories, bawdy stories, moral stories … everyone got into the act. There was just something in the air.

600 years later, we’re still telling stories in April – except that now, there’s none of that unpleasant walking. You can join any number of tour-groups from the comfort of your own PC, laptop, tablet or web-enabled phone. There’s the Ultimate Blog Challenge – where pilgrims pledge to write 30 posts in 30 days. Or the slightly less arduous A-Z Blogging Challenge for all 26 days of April ( – quite properly, they discount the Sabbath). Or, if like Chaucer, the Muse moves you to burst out into poetry, there’s NaPoWriMo (- I know! But these macronyms are popular in the US, they tell me).

If you haven’t started yet, and you’d like to join, it’s not too late. You can still catch up with us.

Now although we have none of the physical hardships of Chaucer’s tale-tellers, we should remember T.S Eliot’s warning – that ‘April is the cruellest month’. I was reminded of that this morning when I read the tale of plucky fellow-pilgrim, Raven Howard. Injured in Spring Training, put on the disabled list, and missing the start of the season, Raven has decided to make up for her enforced inactivity by accepting the Ultimate Blog Challenge. It’s a wise decision: in my experience, the perfect way to warm up for a prolonged period of inactivity is to commit yourself to writing a blog, backed up of course by all the normal TwitFace support activities.

But blogging can still be dangerous. Why, only last night I fell off my chair after falling asleep at the keyboard – and I hadn’t taken precautions. Like Raven, I could have had a nasty injury. So, since there are so many inexperienced bloggers joining us at the beginning of this pilgrimage season, it seemed a good time to give you …

THE TWITFACE GUIDE TO HEALTH AND SAFETY

1. A quiet, secure working area

Your job is demanding and requires the utmost concentration. Exposure to noise and frequent interruption while blogging causes stress, and may even result in a missed retweet or direct message. Ideally you should set up your workspace in an area removed from normal family life. But if you choose to work under the stairs or in a cupboard, make sure that there is adequate ventilation and lighting. If your only option is to work in a high-traffic area, then follow the directions in note 2 carefully.

2. Signage

Make sure that working areas are clearly demarcated and signed, and that instructions are clear and precise. ‘Genius at work’ is an example of a particularly bad sign, since it gives no indication of how the reader is supposed to behave. It may also cause precisely the disruption that you are trying to avoid. More effective are: ‘Keep out!’, ‘Silence!’, or ‘Go Away!’. Your signs need to be prominently displayed. If you are working in a high-traffic area, I have found it effective to pin signs to your headgear or writer’s jacket (as described below).

3. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

In my previous post, I demonstrated how to create a successful TwitFace Plan (and I’ve been delighted to hear that so many of you have found my schedule a useful template). But as well as micro-planning your own work, it’s important to define Standard Operating Procedures for other members of your household, and then to make sure that they understand and buy in to the plan. For example, there needs to be total clarity about when you may be interrupted. If the kitchen’s on fire or your spouse is having a nervous breakdown, at what point should you be notified, and what are the escalation procedures? For a deeper understanding of SOPs, please refer to the excellent post from fellow-pilgrim, Shilpa Venkateshwaran.

4. Ergonomics


Wanna end up looking like this?
The use that sextant!

Musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) are common in TwitFacers, due to poor chair and desk positioning. When setting up your workspace, check that your seating position, knees and elbows are all at a 90 degree angle, as shown not shown in the illustration. Beginners are then advised to check and if necessary recalibrate their positions every 15 minutes using a sextant. (For approximate angles, a spirit level may suffice – but it looks unprofessional.)

5. Clothing (The Writer’s Jacket)



(Back view)

Some time ago, my wife bought me the rather attractive jacket pictured – but until recently we’d never found a use for it. Now I’m a TwitFacer, it’s an important part of my writing equipment. Light, comfortable, it allows me to buckle or chain myself to the chair to prevent falls. There’s one small disadvantage: if chained in, you need a second person to release you. Earlier this week I was locked into my chair for three days before anyone noticed I was missing. That’s why I decided not to wear it last night – with disastrous consequences. A well-written SOP can help to prevent family oversights.

6. Protective Headgear

TwitFacers debate the best type of headgear for a writer. Some prefer the extra protection of a cycling helmet. I prefer a beanie, more comfortable and, in my view, sufficient to minimize damage to the skull in most writing-related accidents. I find it difficult to imagine that I could fall head-first from my chair, although encounters with the desk are not infrequent, particularly in late-night sessions.

7. Work-Life Balance

Don’t let social media take over your whole life. Remember there’s a real world out there too. Every so often, when you need a break, why not pull up the Sudoko screen, or play a couple of hands of Hearts?

Follow these guidelines and I’m sure you’ll find that blogging is an enjoyable and fulfilling experience.

Have I missed anything important? If you have any other great tips and advice, let me know, and we’ll add them to the list.

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The TwitFace Plan

April 1, 2011 in Activities, The TwitFace Project | 7 comments

camel

I wonder if schools still teach that old W.H. Davies poem?

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

It’s a relic of another age. The words of a man who chose to spend much of his early life on the road in Britain and the USA at the turn of the 20th century, sleeping rough, hustling a living, writing. If you’d offered him an iPhone, he’d probably have tossed it straight in the ditch.

I’m ashamed to confess that 20 years ago, I’d have done the same. I remember someone pleading with me to carry a pager so that people in my team could reach me out-of-hours. Selfishly, I refused point-blank: I had another life. I wrote a song: ‘Killing me softly with his bleep’.

But I’m happy to report that I’ve now seen the error of my ways, and my social rehabilitation is almost complete. Why, only this morning I signed up to the Ultimate Blog Challenge – committing myself to post 30 times in 30 days. That must surely make me a … what? Socialist? No, wrong connotations. Sociophile? I’d get banned. Help me, I’m struggling here… ah, got it – I’m a .. a TwitFacer.

Here’s my Daily TwitFace Plan:

3 hours – Twitter: Check follows, mentions, retweets and messages. Thank and follow everyone who’s included @alain_miles – unless I can see they’re going to bombard me with sales pitches. Check blogs, contribute where appropriate. Plan and schedule the day’s tweets. Repeat repeatedly.

2 hours – Facebook: Check all new messages and requests. Visit friends’ pages and show support. Remove Networked Blogs every time it tries to multi-network my blog. Puzzle over why wife gets more Likes than me.

2 hours – LinkedIn: Check my groups and responses to my discussions. Respond to responses. Link (and consider Twitter, Facebook links too: do NOT re-open Twitter!). Scan new questions posted – respond to one or two. Post a new discussion every two days and sneak in a reference to blog.

2 hours – Feeds and email: Check mails from blogs where I subscribe directly. Remove unwanted spam. Scan spam to find mail I wanted to read. Respond where appropriate. Check responses to responses of responses, and respond.

3 hours – Write today’s blog-post. Time allotted allows for thinking, blank-time, writing, editing, posting Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn notices. (Do NOT re-open Twitter!)

2 hours – Read: Find great new writers, and post reviews. Suggest reciprocal blogging – it’s such a great tool for writers.

1 hour – Amazon, Smashwords: check for new sales & reviews. Modify pricing to stimulate more sales and reviews. Check favourite Amazon groups. Make useful contributions, remembering never to mention book and offend readers. Check responses to my responses of responses to my responses, and respond.

20 mins – My next novel: research and writing time.

1 hour – Feedburner and Google Analytics: Analyze visit and subscriptions statistics; check key entry/exit points and click data. Wonder whether its all worthwhile. Make a new plan.

This is still a first draft. It’ll need tweaking to make space for eating. Note to self: remember to tweet wife to see if we can reschedule meals to a convenient slot.

Oh – and what’s a cow?

References:

The Ultimate Blog Challenge – get your blogging on track like me – but quickly, it starts today!


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Adding value or just creating noise?

March 24, 2011 in Reflections | No comments

So last night I opened an email from an Australian web-acquaintance, Syd Harbour, who runs a writer support network. Syd was venting off at a writer called Wally, who had sent out a mass mail along these lines:

Hi folks – I’m an award-winning photographer who’s just branched out into writing, and my first novel is “Teenage Vampire Ninja”. It’s the story of an 18-year old on the trail of a pack of vampires who destroyed his family. My Amazon link is ….

From someone unknown, uninvited. No indication that Wally even knew who Syd was. Spam.

Syd tracked Wally down and read him the riot act. How could Wally even think of behaving like that? “I was just following advice”, said Wally. “I spoke to J.K.Fowling – you know, that guy who’s selling all those ebooks, and he told me this was the way to do it.”

Syd then goes on to give us the usual netiquette homily – find out who you’re talking to (Syd doesn’t review fiction), no unsolicited messages, no mass mailings … and then proceeds to give us a link to Wally’s book page! And his website! And how to message him! And to cap it all, he tells us that Wally’s Amazon author page needs revamping and invites us to go visit it and send our comments!

There were repercussions too. Fowling had written in to deny any contact with Wally. I wondered how far it was going to go. Did we have another Rebecca Black on our hands? I checked Wally’s Amazon listing position this morning. Good, lower than mine: that’s OK then.

If I’d never seen Syd’s other output (and if Wally had shot to the top of the listings), I might have thought this was the smartest piece of viral marketing I’ve seen for a while. I don’t think it was that, but it raises important issues about who we associate with, and how we writers promote ourselves and others.

In a comment here the other day, Jamaican author Joy Campbell said: “I feel like I’m pimping my work every time I make reference to it.” I guess we all feel like that to some extent as we try to get someone – anyone – to please just take a look at our book.

Sometimes we hunt in packs: for example, members of the Independent Authors Network help each other out by retweeting other members. I’ve met good people there, and I’m happy to support writers who are doing good work, but there are dangers in working blind and supporting indiscriminately – IAN is growing fast and sadly just this week, a member was suspended when it was noted the author page was racking up 1000 hits an hour – a group of Facebook dwarfs apparently clicking away all day long. Credit to IAN founder William Potter for dealing with the problem quickly.

Noise - thanks Nevit Dilmen

Noise
thanks Nivet Dilmen

We do the indie writing community no favors at all if we come across as loud-mouthed web-hogs or promote work of dubious quality. I’ve done it – probably most of us have. But we constantly need to ask ourselves: Am I adding value to the community and supporting people and ideas that need to be heard? Or am I just creating noise? Is my viral marketing pleasing, or just sneezing?

Oh, that story about Syd and Wally. All true, every word of it. But the names and book title and context have been changed to prevent further viral infection.




References:
The Independent Author Network. And here’s my author page there … just to show you how it works, you understand, not to promote my work in any way!

Rebecca Black – 29 million hits for ‘the worst song ever’ – no, you find her – I’m not going to promote her.


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Why I won’t be selling my novel for $495

March 19, 2011 in Reflections | 8 comments

Limited edition potato

‘Worth more than my novel?’
Answers are not required in ‘Comments’

A year ago, as I was getting ready to publish my first novel, I set myself a target. If I was going to be a real writer, then I had to be able to make a proper living through writing. So how have I done so far?

In English English: ‘Not quite as well as I might have done.”

In any other language: “Total wipeout”.

Smashwords: Sold – 121. Earnings – $65.35
Amazon – US: Sold – 33. Earnings – $29.66
Amazon – UK: Sold – 3. Earnings – £0.78

So that’s 157 copies and around $96 earned for the year. Call me cautious, but somehow I don’t think I’ll be able to give up the day job just yet. I’ll need to do better: about 500 times better. Excluding taxation.

So one solution could be to increase the price by a factor of 500. ‘That will be $495, sir. Thank you.’ You know, I have a funny feeling that might just work. I could make it a limited edition, probably grab a few headlines for the most expensive book in the world, and I bet I’d get a few takers.

But that’s not what I’m going to do. I’m going to leave the price exactly where it has been for most of the year – $0.99 or £0.74 (+VAT). The price of a large potato.

Is that what my novel’s worth? I guess it depends how hungry you are. A potato’s certainly more nutritious. It fills a spot. Even if 157 people seem to have opted for my book instead.

Actually, that’s not quite true. The vast majority of my Smashwords ‘sales’ have come when I’ve offered a free copy as part of a promotion – there were 70 just last week during Read An Ebook Week. So these readers probably didn’t have to sacrifice their daily potato. And I suspect that some – maybe most – will be book-hoarders, accumulating books just in case they need them some rainy day. They’ll probably never read mine.

This is why there’s huge debate about what an ebook price ought to be. My Facebook friend and fellow-Brit-lit-author, Ali M Cooper, fulminated recently against price-cutting:

My UK kindle sales continue to drop as the market is flooded by under £1 ‘bargains’ as authors try to undercut each other … My personal guideline is that if I don’t think a full length novel is worth the price of a pint of beer then I shouldn’t be publishing it.

Several other writers agreed with Ali that price-cutting writers should take account of the ‘long-term perceived value of books’ and encouraged a firm stand on pricing. Selling at a low price implied a lack of confidence in your own book, they said.

But then there was another point of view expressed by Carolyn McCray, founder of the Indie Book Collective, in a post this week on understanding the Amazon book-page. You need to get at least 5 – 10 reviews, she said, and fill the ‘Customers-Who-Bought-This-Item-Also-Bought‘ bar. Her advice is:

Price your book at 99 cents (the lowest allowed by Amazon) and drive as much traffic as you can during your ‘soft’ launch window. Once you have the bar filled you can re-price your book.

There’s my problem. My amazon.com page has fantastic reviews – but only three of them. And the books other people bought with mine? A book on Lebanese cuisine, three books on quantum physics and .. oh yes, this is bound to bring the customers flooding in – The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t allow me to re-design my ‘associated books’ bar. I’ll just have to wait until some future customer chooses better bedfellows.

And as for my UK Amazon page. No reviews. No book-links. Nada.

So you see, I’ve got a way to go to establish any kind of credibility. Pricing is just one way I can persuade people to take a peek, maybe download the sample.

Free is probably not the best way – not for novels anyway, although there may be a case for free short stories to introduce people to your work.

But working at the price of least resistance does seem sensible, at least until my reputation begins to grow outside my immediate circle of friends and acquaintances. Perhaps that time will come with The Lebanese Troubles. Perhaps it will be the next novel. Or the third.

If it was just about pricing it would be easy. Unfortunately, it isn’t. A year on, I’m still learning about how to position and present my book, and this week I’ve been busy updating my promotional pages, and even the book content. You may have noticed changes in this blog too – all designed to make it easier for the potential reader to say ‘Yes’, and inspired largely by Carolyn McCray’s article.

There’s another important requirement. Hard work. Talking to your friends and supporters constantly, not necessarily beating your author-drum all the time, but just communicating. Let me return to Ali Cooper. I don’t know how she’d describe her last 12 months, but I’d call it a success.

Ali published her first novel, The Girl on the Swing around 12 months ago, at about the same time as me. It’s a beautifully-controlled, tightly written psycho-drama, the sort of novel I enjoy reading (especially since it follows in the Hardy/Fowles tradition of featuring Lyme Regis). But since Ali’s book is entirely devoid of vampires, cops and wizards … and is not priced at less than a dollar … it’s pretty unlikely to knock Amanda Hocking or J.A.Konrath from their perch at the top of the indie popularity list.

Carefully, steadily, Ali has nurtured her readership, maintaining the writer contacts she built while developing the novel, making new friends (like me) through the various Kindle boards, maintaining a daily presence through Facebook. In all of this, Ali has been much more consistent than me, and now her hard work is really beginning to pay off. Just look at the reviews she’s accumulated. From results she’s mentioned publicly over the past couple of months, I should think that she has a very real chance of achieving my target, self-sufficiency through writing, as she releases her next novel, Cave, at Easter. And from a potato’s-eye view, that’s inspiring!

Useful links:
Ali Cooper: The Girl on a Swing, Amazon US – Amazon UK

Carolyn McCray: Best Practices For Amazon Ebook Sales

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Designing Your Own Book Cover

March 24, 2010 in Activities | 3 comments

The Lebanese Troubles - Cover

Let’s get this straight. I can’t draw for nuts. Ask me to draw a picture of someone and you’re going to get Mr Blob.

That doesn’t stop me from enjoying art. Perhaps it even increases my enjoyment because I see creativity which is way beyond my skills. And it doesn’t stop me from attempting to create my own book designs, because with the tools now available, even the complete bumbler, like me, can create something that looks pretty good.

In the next two posts I’m going to explain how I created two covers this week, as well as taking a close look at the work of a professional.

At the top left, there’s a thumbnail of the cover for my forthcoming novel, The Lebanese Troubles. If you click on the thumbnail, you’ll be taken to a full-size version, the way the cover would appear on the front of a paperback. Try clicking now, and take a look in detail.

Now in fact I’ve broken a few basic rules with this cover design. Take a look at the Book Design Review’s Favorite Book Covers of 2008 and you’ll notice that many of the designs are very simple, minimalist -- a single object dominates the cover, asks a question, and tries to draw the reader straight in. Colors and fonts are bold. Font orientation appears to be important too -- sideways, downward, tilted, anything to capture the potential reader’s attention.

My cover couldn’t be more different. The central image (seen much more clearly in the full-size version) is tiny, overshadowed by buildings. It’s an oil painting with a great deal of subtlety in the coloring, and the fonts are all straight on.

So why did I make such an unusual choice? Well, the starting-point was to find a design that captured the essence of the novel. The Lebanese Troubles is set in the Lebanese Civil War … but this is no action-hero shoot-em-up. Instead, it’s the story of the steady disintegration of human relationships mirroring the collapse of civilized society. The protagonist gradually becomes isolated, an outsider, uncertain where he belongs, confused about moral values.

I trawled through Google looking for appropriate images, and found nothing that really suited. Plenty of pictures of shattered buildings and bombed out neighborhoods -- but where was the humanity? And then suddenly, I found exactly what I was looking for. I came across a portfolio of work by a British painter called Tom Young, who, as it happened, went to live in Lebanon 4 years ago -- and when I saw his picture, ‘20 Years‘, my jaw just dropped. He’d captured exactly the feeling that I’d tried to convey in my novel.

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of meeting Tom, when he was back in the UK for a few days, and it was no surprise to find that we shared a love of Camus’s novel, L’Étranger. I guess I hadn’t realized until then how much that book has influenced The Lebanese Troubles.

So I had a picture that I loved. But would it work as a cover design, when it was so different from most others? I remembered one of the comments on the BDR’s selection of favorite designs.

I picked one of the three covers that inspired me to click through to find out a bit more about the book itself (and to me, all three are equally intriguing, perhaps because of some amalgamation of my own interests and the cover design)

My mind was made up. Marrying the reader’s interests with the cover design. The Lebanese Troubles is unashamedly literary. So the type of reader who might enjoy it is likely to enjoy literature as art. Choosing a painting for the cover rather than a formula book design would be sending all the right signals. OK, perhaps the subtlety of the painting might escape the casual browser. Perhaps I could draw in more readers with the weapons of war featured somewhere on the cover. But I’d be making false promises, raising false expectations, and possibly leaving the reader disappointed.

Having reached my decision, designing the cover was fairly straightforward. First I saved a copy of Tom’s painting (with his permission of course). The next step was to decide which part of the picture to use. As you’ll see as you look at the original, it’s in landscape format, and I needed to convert it to portrait. The tool I used was something I’ve used for several years for cutting an image, resizing it, and then saving it in an appropriate format (.jpg, .gif, or .png) for printing or screen display -- IrfanView.

Next I needed to think about the title, and it was at this point that important marketing decisions were needed. I’m preparing my novel for two possible editions, a print edition at some point, but firstly as an ebook, in order to minimize the risks and maximize the income. But as I explained in an earlier post, the cover design is just as important -- perhaps more so -- when we’re e-publishing. And when we’re promoting an ebook, the details, including the title, need to be perfectly clear, even when the cover is reduced to a thumbnail.

These were my next steps. I copied the selection of the painting I wanted and pasted it into Microsoft Powerpoint. I thought about where I wanted the title to appear. Not within the design, I thought. I didn’t want words floating in the sky, or hatched out on the road at the bottom of the picture. Let the painting stand and speak for itself. So I was going to need a border. What color? Well, The Lebanese Troubles is a tragedy, so let it be black. Black would offset the painting well too. So I created a black background in Powerpoint, and laid it under 20 Years.

Then which font for the title? I liked the look of ‘Papyrus’, one of the standard Microsoft fonts I had available. It had a distinctly oriental feel, and I liked the way the capital letters descended below the line. So the next decision was font size. After a little experimentation I found that a 36-point font, using bold, meant that the title was still readable even with a small thumbnail. But that gave me a new problem.

At that point-size the title would need to be set over two lines. Then of course, there was the author’s name to think about. This meant that I would need to further reduce the height of the painting … or shrink it, so that the tiny figure became completely invisible.

For a while I played with the idea of using a different title. Suppose I just called the book ‘The Troubles‘? But that would hit my marketing campaign. I need the word ‘Lebanese’ to appear to appeal to Middle East expats. And it would hit the Search Engine campaign I’ve been carefully building. If you do a Google search for ‘Lebanese Troubles’, you’ll see that of nearly 7.3 million matches, my novel is already in positions 3 and 5. That’s going to be extremely important later. Drop ‘Troubles’ then? No, for the same reason. And because I really like the double entendre -- political troubles and my protagonist’s family,relationship and moral troubles. So the title had to stay. And it would have to be over two lines -- centered, I thought, looked best.

If I’d added my name at the top as well, the whole cover would have looked top heavy, so I decided to add it at the bottom. Another decision. If the book was called The Lebanese Troubles and there was a picture of devastation in Beirut, some readers would think it’s non-fiction -- an account of the War. I needed to make it clear it wasn’t, so the cover needed ‘A novel by Alain Miles‘. I’d decided to use a more straightforward font. (I read somewhere that every book should have two fonts, no more, no less -- I have no idea why, but too many fonts certainly gets messy.) But a 36-point size would mean two lines again. I really couldn’t afford to take more space from the painting, so I reduced the point-size until I could fit it onto one line. It’s a compromise. The name isn’t so clear in a thumbnail, but as an unknown anyway, I think I can afford to live with that. People won’t be buying because it’s me. (Except my Mum.)

One last decision. What color was the text to be? I was tempted to go for red. The war, red-hot emotions etc … but, on a black background this just got lost in the thumbnail. I needed something much lighter. In the end it was a pale gold, classy I think … and there is after all a reference to Lebanese Gold in the novel!

And that was it. I copied the complete cover back to IrfanView and created two .png versions, one in paperback size and the other in thumbnail size. My book cover was ready for publication.

Nothing I’ve described here requires any great technical skill. The difficulty was only finding the right material in the first place, and then making the right decisions. The beauty of e-publishing the book first is that if my cover doesn’t make the impact I expect, I’ll be able to spot the problem almost immediately, try something different if necessary -- and then implement the changes in just a few hours. But I hope I’m not wrong. Now that you’ve read this long description, you’ll no longer see the cover in the same way that a newcomer to my work would, but I’ll be interested to hear your comments anyway.

The process of designing your cover isn’t always quite as straightforward as my description here. Take a look at a professional designer at work by playing the outstanding video from Orbit Books below. Think it looks hard? Well, join me next time and I’ll show you how you can do most of this yourself. Using free software.

 

 

Posted Previously: What Scribd taught me about book design

 

Don’t forget to check the front page of Resources, which lists the new material added each day -- and remember that your contributions are welcome here too

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Short Stories To Build Readership

March 12, 2010 in planning | 3 comments

I made a big decision a few days ago. I’d entered a short story, Waiting For Orders, for a competition. I was really pleased with the story, and the competition results were due to be announced any day. The top 10-15 stories would be published in an anthology, and I knew there were fewer than 100 entries. Reviewers were pretty positive. I had a reasonable chance.

But I pulled the story out of the competition. Why? Because with my evolving marketing plan, it just didn’t make sense to keep it there.

Of course, I might not have won through. When we enter our writing for any competition, it’s always a gamble. What if you just don’t connect with the judges? But let’s suppose my story had been selected. What would I have gained?

  1. Publication. A GOOD THING because:
    • I’ll like it. It proves that someone else thinks I can write. And it gives me something to brag about to agents and publishers later.
    • My friends will like it. They’ll tell me that now I’m featured in a proper book, I’m a proper writer.
    • My mother will like it – once she’s recovered from the shock of the swear-words, the heresy, and the unwarranted, unkind attack on poets in the story.
  2. Money. The winners will be paid $50 on acceptance, and there’s a chance there might be more later if the book does well. But I’d be surprised if any of the contributors ended up making more than $200.

I’m sorry. It’s not really a very convincing list. But I can think of lots of convincing disadvantages.

  1. If accepted, I would have to give up my rights to the story for 5 years – the length of the contract. I would have no right to publish anywhere else – whether in print or electronically. But I need this story in my portfolio.
  2. I would have no control over the publication date. I want to use the story now – but in the hands of a publisher, it’ll probably take at least another six months before it appears in print.
  3. I’d lose control over pricing. If I want to distribute the story free of charge in order to build my readership, I won’t be able to do so.
  4. I’d like to experiment with different publishing formats – including audio-shorts for the IPod. This story, with its distinctive ‘voice’, is a good candidate for audio treatment, but if accepted, this might have been difficult to negotiate.

My decision has allowed me to start using Waiting for Orders to build my readership right now – today. You’ll notice that I’ve added a new page for Short Stories to the blog, and if you open the page, you’ll see that I’m encouraging you – if you like the story – to share it with friends and to promote it by posting it to social-sharing services like Stumble Upon, where you can also review it.

If you have a blog and short stories ready to show the world, why don’t you join me to help to build your market too? It doesn’t matter whether you’re following the traditional agent/publisher route or, like me, are planning to publish electronically. In either case this should help us to build our readership. And if we let each other know what we’re releasing, then we can all indulge in some beneficial cross marketing.

There’s an important quality control rule though: none of us should recommend a story unless we believe it’s of the highest standard, and that our friends would be bound to enjoy it. If we don’t keep our standards high, our friends will think we’re spamming them when we share.

And if we notice that our stories aren’t being shared, that’s probably a sign that they are not making sufficient impact.

Note that my intention is not to sell stories at this stage. The time for that will come when people are consistently reading what I publish. As ever, I’m going to set a measurable objective. I aim to release a new short story at least once a month. Once I see that these releases are consistently being read by at least 100 people, then I’ll introduce a small charge for new stories … and we’ll then be able to study the impact of different pricing levels.

I’ve also posted a short Twitter message this evening: ‘An environment-unfriendly short story for your reading pleasure – http://www.arealwriter.com/short-stories/waiting-for-orders/’. Will this result in any new readers? I don’t know, but I need to test it – at present I have around 70 Twitter ‘followers’. Will this boost their numbers? Will it bring new people to the blog? I’ll be monitoring the results in Google Analytics very closely, watching to see the source of new readers. And then in coming days, I’ll also test-publish the story on various other writer sites, and check the response. I’ll take just one different site each day to make it easy to measure the results. If you’ve previously worked with any sites which e-publish short stories, I’d be interested to hear your experiences.

Finally, I’m aware that some of you still have entries in the competition I’ve opted out of. To all of you, the very best of luck. The decision I’ve made is right for me, but may be completely wrong for others. I read a lot of high quality submissions, and I’m sure the anthology will be great – I’ll certainly be reviewing and promoting it here when it’s published.

 

Related reading: Two time winner of the Faulkner Award for Fiction, John Edgar Wideman explains why he has decided to self-publish from now on: ‘I like the idea of being in charge. I have more control over what happens to my book. And I have more control over whom I reach.’

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Google Analytics to measure engagement

March 7, 2010 in planning, Results | 3 comments

 

In the next three posts I’ll be looking at reader engagement. This time I’ll look at how to measure engagement, and propose short-term targets in an Engagement Scoresheet. Next time, the topic will be how to build engagement. And in the third post, I’ll explain how I plan to convert engagement into sales.

To make a start, let’s see what Google Analytics can do for us in this 5-screen display.

 

Download (PDF, 77.45KB)

This display created with Google Docs and the WordPress plugin, Google Doc Embedder.
Another WordPress plugin, WP Google Analytics, helped me to connect the blog to Analytics in just a couple of minutes.



There’s much more that Google Analytics can do for you. For example you can find out which links have been clicked (although I can’t get this to play with WordPress at the moment); you can see how many times people have revisited; you can see which outbound links are the most popular. But which are the most important measurements for me?

Once again I need to go back to my objective. $18,000 net income per year is my target. Let’s suppose that my receipts are 50% of total sales revenues (and if I can improve on that percentage, that’ll be good). So I need to aim at $36,000 in sales revenue. That means I’ll have to find around 3000 engaged readers who are prepared to spend at least $12 a year on my creative output.

How do we define the number of engaged readers? I’m going to be measuring the number of people returning at least three times a week. I’ll be tracking also the number of visits per week where more than 3 pages were accessed, and where the time spent on site was more than 3 minutes.

I also want to measure how many people are actually reading the creative writing elements – at the moment how many people are reading the sample chapters of The Lebanese Troubles. And when they’ve started, do they continue? This after all, is the point of the whole marketing exercise. The key measurable here will be how many people have read at least 50% of the creative writing samples on the site – we’ll be aiming at 3000 by March 2011.

Am I expecting to get 3000 engaged readers for this site – A Real Writer? Absolutely not. I hope that fellow-writers will enjoy my experiments in literature, but I’ve identified other niche audiences for my work too – which I’ll talk about next time. I’ll be aiming for engagement with them too, but they’re unlikely to follow me here. There will be other sites, a Facebook fan page, Twitter – I’ll expand more on this as we go on. But for now, let’s look at a possible Engagement Scoresheet, laying down some fairly modest targets for the next 30 days.



Engagement Scoresheet

A monthly update, showing the results achieved to date and the targets for the next 30 days. (This display created with the Wordpress plugin, WP-Target Reloaded)
1st MarchTarget
31st March		Notes
BLOG Visits0600Fairly low expectations for Month 1 - Seeking min 150% increase per month for each of these targets.
Unique visitors050
People > 12 visits this month040
Visits > 3 minutes0200
Visits > 3 pages0200
Feed subscribers020As recorded by Feedburner
FACEBOOK friends3050Novel fan page planned for April.
TWITTER fans3360Tracking writer communities this month.
TWITTER mentions + questions020
No of Sales00First sales expected May
Net income- $60- $60Cost of website for 12 months

 


Nothing too ambitious for month 1, but if I want to achieve the targets, I’ll need to register month-of-month increases of at least 150%. How? That’s for next time.

Now tell me which other key measurements I’ve missed.


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A Writer’s Objectives

March 5, 2010 in planning | 12 comments

 

In my first post I mentioned that my objective was not simply to see my name in print. What I want is:

To be a full-time creative writer engaging enough readers and generating enough income to support myself and my family.

In business, that would be called a mission statement.

I’ve chosen the words carefully. ‘A creative writer‘. That rules out taking on writing and research assignments for others. Plenty of writers do supplement their income like this, but it’s not for me: I know I’d lose focus and there wouldn’t be enough hours in the day for my creative work. That’s always been the problem – finding enough time to do the writing that really matters to me.

‘Engaging readers‘ is different from ‘winning fans’. We saw in the previous post that Josh Woodward has used the web to attract huge numbers of fans, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he has huge sales. In the age of viral marketing, all of us are signing up, subscribing, following – it’s a fad. How many times this year have you signed up for a site? How many do you continue to follow? How often have you parted with money?

Engagement is converting brand recognition into brand loyalty. More important than the number of fans is the number of people who come back and read again, the amount of time they spend reading. And ultimately whether they’re willing to put their hand in their pocket for the work I sell. As Gary Stein explains in a recent post, the most effective interactive marketers are ‘forcefully evolving their engagement strategies away from a simple number of who-has-the-most-fans to something that actually has some value: what-do-my-fans-get-me?’

There’s much more to say about engagement; in my next post I’ll explain how I propose to build it, and how I’m going to measure it. But now I need to expand on my mission statement. It’s still too vague. The stated objective is to generate income to support my family. How much income – and in what timeframe? Without real numbers, there’s no way to evaluate success or, later, to judge whether the strategy needs adjustment.

What I’m doing here is to apply to myself the same rules I’ve been using in my professional career for the past few years. As a business consultant, I’ve helped businesses and individuals to define their objectives and then manage achievement. The golden rule is always to set up measurable targets. When individuals say they want a career-change, I ask them to write their resumé – as they want it to look in three years time. Then together we work out a route-map to get there, with clear milestones.

I’m not giving myself the luxury of a three-year plan. I know myself too well. When I dive into a project, I find it very difficult to focus on anything else – I’m not a multi-tasker. So if I’m going to get serious about writing, I need writing to support me within one year. Support – what does that mean in real money? Well let’s not get over-ambitious or write in too many luxuries. In fact, let’s depersonalize it, by setting as a target the equivalent of the UK minimum wage for a 40-hour week. That’s around $18,000 per year. Of course I’m not going to start earning right away. But by March 2011, I need to be earning a net income from writing averaging at least $1,500 per month.

If I was stacking shelves in a supermarket it would be a breeze. For a writer it’s not so easy. But by setting my objectives, I’m already sensing the shape of the plan.

  1. At this stage in my career I won’t be looking for an agent or a publisher. Even if by some stroke of good fortune I was signed up quickly, it would take months before a book appeared on the shelves. Any advance for an unknown first-time novelist would be relatively small – certainly lower than $18,000. Assuming I earned a 10% royalty on a $14.99 book, I’d have to be selling 1500 books a month to meet my target. That very rarely happens – not at the beginning of a career.

  2. E-publishing looks a better bet than self-publishing or print-on-demand. It’s faster – and I need to get started as soon as possible – less expensive, less risky, easier to distribute, and while a novel would be priced lower (typically around the $4.99 mark – anyone like to research this?), the royalty would be 70% or greater. This would leave me with only around 425 books to sell per month to reach my target.

  3. But even this sales target is high. There will need to be other sources of creative-writing income. So what might they be?

(Now it’s time for you to put your thinking caps on: let’s have some left-field thinking – can we learn anything from musicians, artists, business, politicians … did you hear today that Tony Blair is getting a £4.5 million advance from Harper Collins for his forthcoming autobiography?)

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Building An Audience

March 4, 2010 in planning | 6 comments

Josh Woodward

I’d like to introduce you to someone I’ve never met, never spoken to, communicated with only once. Josh Woodward. That’s him on the left. Josh writes dark, sensitive songs which I love. Listen to Josephine and I hope you’ll see why.

How did I come across Josh’s work? Well there’s a website called Garageband, where unpublished musicians post their work, which is then reviewed anonymously by reviewers. I was keeping my writing skills sharp a couple of years back, writing music reviews, and that’s when I first heard Josh.

I liked what I heard, and wanted to find out more. I checked his profile page. What I found there was an enormous catalog of material – 150 songs, 7 CDs. Today many of Josh’s songs are flying high at the top of the Garageband acoustic charts. And there’s something else. If you want to download any of the songs, you can. For free! Alternatively, Josh offers the physical CDs and charges a flat $4 for shipping costs, but leaves it up to his fans to decide what they want to pay – there’s a minimum charge of $2 to cover the material costs.

Is this a good business model? I don’t know. I’ll see if I can persuade Josh to tell us whether his music is supporting him, or whether he does something else to earn his daily bread.

But one thing’s for sure. He’s certainly built up a large fan-base. Josh is all over the web. As well as his website, he has a presence on MySpace (40,000 plays), ILike (8400 fans), Facebook (1300 fans), YouTube (top songs have over 10,000 plays). Not forgetting Twitter, where he engages one-on-one with fans.

All this without a publisher. Which has other advantages. Josh retains control over what he records, when he releases it, and the price he charges for it. So, when the Haiti earthquake struck, Josh recorded and released a song ‘Motionless Land’, the same day, inviting listeners to send donations to Doctors Without Frontiers. OK, as he says himself, it was a rough cut, but on this occasion he wanted to respond immediately.

So what can we writers learn from this web pioneer? Well, most obviously, that it’s possible to build a career and a fan-base without an agent and a publisher (or in his case a manager and a record-label). Provided there is:

Commitment: The fan base didn’t grow overnight – I know that Josh has been working on this since at least 2005.

Continuity: Josh has been releasing new songs every few weeks, so that his fans never forget who he is. Now I’m planning to publish The Lebanese Troubles fairly soon, but I’m not likely to finish another novel for another year or so. So if my aim, like Josh’s, is to steadily build my audience and help readers to remember me, then why not publish a few short stories as well … and release them as he has, on the web? Perhaps in audio format too, for the IPod. I wonder if there’s a market?

Control: At this stage in my career I, like Josh, want to retain control of the entire publishing and pricing process. I want to be able to write a story and get it to my audience next week, not wait six months for it to appear. I want to be sure that pricing is set to encourage the maximum number of purchases. (Incidentally there’s a good deal of evidence to show that ebook sales are not necessarily stronger when the price is set very low – but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Coverage: Readers need to be able to find our work easily and see our names regularly. We need to be on all the main social networking sites, and be clear about what we are trying to achieve on each one (- again a topic for another post).

Communication: I’m incredibly impressed that with all these fans, Josh still manages to communicate with them personally. People who talk to him will feel they have a stake in his success. Twitter is a good choice as a communication channel. As the fan network grows, it keeps messages short – or we could find this overwhelming.

Creative Commons Licensing: We need to learn when it’s best to allow readers to copy, download and share our work. In publishing, there’s huge discussion at present about DRM – Digital Rights Management. Essentially this is all about publishers defending their traditional territory – ensuring that work cannot be copied and current pricing-levels are maintained. In the process of building my market, I want to be DRM-free.

Put it like this. If Josh Woodward hadn’t made his work shareable, I wouldn’t have been able to write this post – and he may not have been able to pick up a few more fans today.

 

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